On Fantasy Game Mechanics and Inspiration

I've played a few fantasy games in my day- Baldur's Gate, Persona, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, Final Fantasy, all of that good stuff. I love them, like I love a Phil Kessel wrist shot or a Nnamdi Asomugha... whatever it is he does to trap NFL receivers in a pocket dimension for the duration of a game.

But they're also kind of ridiculous. At times. Which makes sense, because they're like dragon-fighting simulators. Some of them have giant floating balls with eyes attached to various appendages that shoot death lasers at you. The point is, they're fantasy, so by their nature critiquing them for realism is beyond pointless. Still, something's always stuck out to me, and this may just be the single nerdiest thing I've ever written about.

In some games, when you take it too far, elemental resistances and immunities stop making sense. Like, if you stack enough cloaks or necklaces or gloves or whatever of fire resistance, you pass the point where you're immune. Suddenly, walking into a 30 ft sphere of fire makes you feel better.

How does that work? I mean, mechanically, it's probably a simple thing to work out. But how does it actually work. What does it look like, how does it feel to be healed by having giant blocks of ice dropped on your head? In a world where this technology exists, do people with the right trinkets run outside holding up pieces of metal every time it rains, just begging some bolt of lightning to fix their broken arm?

Now normally when I think such things, I do what any normal person would do. Forget about it, and go find someone to cast Fire 3 on my character so that I can keep the MP I'd spend casting Cura. But then I thought, what would it be like from a character's point of view? How would it shape the way they think, the way they act? I'm not sure what the point of all this is, except to say video games can be inspirational. But maybe not always in the way they were intended.

To elaborate on my point on something less silly, I sometimes feel that fantastic elements- like magic, fantasy races, prophecies etc. are included in stories without consideration to the broader effects they might have on the world, and on society.

For example, in a world where teleportation exists, how does bank security work? If some people can become invisible, how is it that every important person anywhere ever isn't assassinated the moment they rise to prominence? If some people can call down fire and lightning and other horrifying things out of the aether, wouldn't tight formations of large numbers of troops be a singularly disastrous tactic? If magic requires the brightest minds and the most strenuous discipline, why does seemingly every mage use their powers to blow stuff up? Why does everyone trust prophecy? If I were an evil being of no small power, I'd just spread false ones making would-be heroes fall into line.

I think there's a lot that can be done, a lot interesting ideas that can be gleaned from looking at the basic mechanics we all take for granted as basic fantasy tropes, and thinking: how would this work if it were actually real? What could we do with it? How would we protect ourselves from it?

I believe a lot of modern, often bordering on satire, fantasy does this. As soon as people become aware of tropes, they start mocking them, and with video games and things such as D&D creating such ridiculous rules, people HAVE begun writing in-world or closely-based-on-world fictions which mock these sorts of things.

Many good writers go to the very best efforts to avoid these sort of obvious pitfalls. I have seen, here and there, most of the examples you picked out played straight or comedically, in ways that really made them work.

The best thing to be done is laying out the rules very, very closely, memorising all the details, and then going for it with a level head. I've seen some good roleplaying fantasy spoofs that took into account the kinds of rules that make the game seem quite ridiculous. If you have the time, one that is one of my favourite stories ever is order of the stick, the webcomic. Just google that - it's all free to read on the internet. Amazing thing there.

On a more serious note, look at Terry Pratchett for fantasy written with cold logic, copious psychology, and the most amazing world building. Though very deep fantastical elements run through his stories, the characters very very rarely actually use magic until they have no other option, and often just use the rules of magic against itself, defeating it with force of mind, logic, and just being plain badass.

On your magic rings of magic resistance = healing, I could quite easily construct a description of how the magical powers in this dude's armour draw the very essence of fire out and use it to heal him - obviously if he has resistance it won't harm him, so he can go play with it where others can't. Magic is energy, and if it's drawn from natural sources, just imagine him surrounded by that energy, and using his booster set of armour to draw it into him.

Definitely more writers are producing stories with a deeper awareness of the mechanics of fantasy. They are usually the books I'm most interested in when it comes to fantasy. And Terry Pratchett is a perfect example.

My favourite recent fantasy novel is Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. I love the book first for the characters, but also because of its incorporation of the mechanics into the actual story. Rather than being a tool of convenience, or something stapled into the story with no deeper bearing on the plot or setting, it shapes the world of the story, and directly informs the plot. It shows that in such a world, magic isn't simply a cool thing that's there, it's something fundamental to society that communities are built upon. And while awesomely powerful, with even the tiniest of errors it can suddenly become catastrophic.

I think your example of how otherwise dangerous magic can be manipulated into healing the target is excellent. It's something I imagine an extremely intelligent person who happens to have the ability to create fire from their fingertips would set out to do. Mass-produced, self-healing suits of armour could be game-changing. A whole story could be made out of an arcane arms race I think if you think of magic as an analogue to technology, you can create some very interesting ideas.

Also, I love Order of the Stick. I just haven't read it in way too long

Heh, should never have doubted your taste. We need to talk Fantasy some more, clearly.

... After I check out Elantris.

(and you catch up on OotS)

I love magical theory. In my own stories I'm always thinking about how the magic works, to the point where I end up infodumping magic textbooks if I don't slap myself on the back of the hand and save it for a few hints here and there in the narration. In my latest fantasy novel I'm trying not to explain, but I am doing a magical arms race.

In my opinion, alot of ludicrous fiction manages to get produced and find an audience by innocently donning the cloak of fantasy.

Now there are two ways of looking at this...

One, invariably, some of the fantasy literature out there is nothing more than juvenile drivel pandering to a juvenile crowd with lots of "sound and fury, signifying nothing" to use a Shakespearean MacBeth quote.

I shan't name any names, but you may recognize it when you see it...

Two, so what, if there is an audience for it and people are buying it then by Zeus let the people have their nectar and ambrosia. They arent hurting anyone, and as long as people are still reading it's much better than them not reading at all. Joseph Campbell used to say that "myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths". They give a lens and tell us what people were (and are) thinking and feeling about.

It does not surprise me that mythology has, does, and shall continue to inspire much fantasy literature. The myths have endured so long because they capture our imagination and communicate with something primeval in us. They allow us to explore fears, lusts, concerns, taboos, etc. They connect us to the past, not only to the actual past but also to a fictionalized and romanticized past that never was.

There are no legends now, we live in an age after the flood, when all the beasts have been slain, the end of the world mapped, and the heroes long dead. We have firemen and the police, yes, they are heroes, but they are not demigods wrestling titans...that's the stuff of true legend. The myths ruin us because they forever set the standards for the epic on cosmic scales. The myths were fashioned by barely literate people with ignorant views on the way the universe was. They were egocentic, geocentric, and inherently male chauvanistic. Too, because they were so wrong about things that now every school child knows they are almost charming in their naivete.

In order to comapre to and compete with the fantastic, fantasy must push the envelope even further. In order to grasp our imaginations and explore our hidden desires it must go where other genres dare not go.

Some fantasy is certainly inspired by the classics and recognizes its value, and tends not to imitate or reinvent it as much as distill them to their base elements to synthesize new legends (my favorite example is Tolkiens' Lord of The Rings - I think he was a master storyteller, that the saga is epic and brilliant, and a worthy competitor to any epic poem of olde).

Some modern fiction is more concerned with profit than the caft, and it shows. If something seems silly or tasteless, it's probably because it's just silly and tasteless...you are not being paranoid.

Very interesting post, and enjoyable to read. Much better written than the blog it's in response to

Without getting too bogged down in particulars, I like that you brought mythology into the discussion. In some ways, the absurdities I talked arise inevitably from taking the aspects of mythology that are all-encompassing, larger than life and decidedly outside the realm of human experience, and making them mundane. Quantifiable. How many d6s of damage does Zeus' thunderbolt do anyway?

But this also leads to what makes fantasy such an interesting and exciting genre. In fantasy, we're free to explore the psychology and philosophies of mythology in a more direct and literal way than is often possible in other genres. We can consider a world of absolute totality, in which every individual thing exists as one part of a single, all-encompassing organism. We can imagine that every natural thing- whether a tree, a rock, or a river, is a living thing, given life by a spirit that can give gifts or inflict curses. At the same time there is much to criticize, much that is horrifying in mythology, and that too can make for excellent stories. Imagine what a modern take on Medea could look like.